Using Sahi, Mink and Behat to test HTML5 drag and drop file uploads

For those that don’t know, Behat is an excellent tool for testing the business expectations of an application. In other words, it’s a behavior-driven approach towards full-stack application acceptance testing. Mink is a browser abstraction layer, allowing you to easily control different browser emulators through a common interface. Combining the two together brings us a mean bag of tricks when it comes to testing web applications.

This morning I had set myself the task of writing the tests for a spiffy HTML5 drag and drop file upload script that is all the rage nowadays. Needless to say it took far longer than I had thought it would. Let’s get started.

Testable elements of the HTML5 drag and drop

Drag and drops work by triggering the drop event of an element. This drop event contains a list of files in a format defined by the HTML5 FileAPI. The Javascript can loop over these file objects and perform client-side file validation checks. This data is then posted via AJAX to another URL. After the server-side processing is done, we get a response object with the results, and we parse these to give feedback to the user whether the upload finally succeeded. As you can see, there are various places we can begin to test.

Attempt 1: Just test the AJAX POST

Because the data is finally POSTed via AJAX, one option is to just test that and leave the rest to manual QA. In fact, we can forego AJAX altogther, and use PHP with cURL to make the request and check the response. Easy. Actually, too easy - we’re ignoring what makes our app cool - the drag and drop!

Attempt 2: Test the legacy file input fallback

Bah. This isn’t why you’re reading this post. You know how to do this already. And anyway, you’ve probably already got a legacy test but now you want to test the spiffy HTML5 one. Moving on.

Attempt 3: Use Sahi to run your test

Hello Sahi! Sahi is a web test automation tool with fully fledged GUI. But more relevant is that it supports Javascript, unlike its faster headless relatives (yes, there’s PhantomJS, but I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s going on in a drag-and-drop widget).

Before we even hit Mink and Behat, try recording the events to turn into a Sahi script. You’ll quickly notice that Sahi (unsurprisingly) doesn’t properly record the event of dropping a file onto the page.

The issue here is that Sahi has no concept of files outside the emulated browser window. There’s a sneaky trick around this. In our Behat definition , we’ll run evaluateScript to dynamically add a file input field, then attach our image file to that field. Now we can grab the file object from that!

If we run the Javascript manually, it works fine. And it also creates a good opportunity to stop and peek at exactly what’s your File object built from. However in Sahi, we don’t have the file object. Why? Because input file field values cannot be manipulated by Javascript for security reasons. But then why does Sahi even provide a function for this? Because “Sahi intercepts the request in the proxy, reads the file off the file system and inserts it into the multipart request”. So Sahi just does a sneaky slide into the form submit at the end.

Taking a peek at Sahi’s setFile documentation, they note they have a _setFile2 function - which essentially converts the input field into a text field in the process. This isn’t going to work either, because we actually need the file object to test.

Finally, Sahi provides a third alternative to selecting files to uploads by emulating native events in the process of selecting a file. It’s at the bottom of their setFile documentation. It basically walks through the steps of opening up the file browse dialogue, typing in the file path with keystrokes … on and on until we get what we want. It’ll work!

Yes, it’ll work. But not nicely. It’s slow. It’s littered with _waits(). Wouldn’t it be nicer if we could create the file object ourselves rather than emulate browsing our filesystem?

Attempt 4: Grab a file object from an image already on the server

Aha! We’ve already got images in our app, let’s just try to upload one of those. We’ll need two things: an image source, and a way to create a file.

For an image source, we’ll grab one with an XMLHttpRequest() in Javascript. We need to make sure that this image source is within Sahi’s proxy, though. This is because otherwise we’d run into cross-domain issues. That’s fine, we’ll upload the Sahi logo as our test image.

To create a File, we’ll create a Blob instead. Files inherit from Blobs, and so we can swap them in an out. Right, let’s see.

Great! So window.myfile will be populated with our file object now. But a test that relies on the existence of a Sahi image? Nasty.

Attempt 5: Create our file object from a base64 string

Simple but effective and none of that extra request messing around. Let’s create an image first. I made a black 100px square image for testing. The simpler the image the better, as it’ll make your base64 string smaller. Now let’s turn that image into base64: